15 Influential Authors

I haven’t done one of these chain letter-type Facebook thingies in awhile but I liked the sound of this one. Instead of keeping it on Facebook, I thought I’d open it up to all you Skepchick readers who might want to give it a go. Here’s the copy pasta:

Don’t take too long to think about it. Fifteen authors (poets included) who have always influenced you and will always stick with you. List the first 15 you can recall in no more than 15 minutes, and they don’t have to be listed in order of relevance to you. Tag at least 15 friends, including me, because I’m interested in seeing what authors my friends chose. (To do this, go to your Notes tab on your profile page, paste the rules in a new notes, list your 15 picks, and tag your friends.)

Rebecca is a writer, speaker, YouTube personality, and unrepentant science nerd. In addition to founding and continuing to run Skepchick, she hosts Quiz-o-Tron, a monthly science-themed quiz show and podcast that pits comedians against nerds. There is an asteroid named in her honor.

Did this on Facebook a while ago and it was a lot harder than I thought. It didn’t help that I was replying to a friend who travels in literary circles, making me afraid that my plain-jane choices would be mocked

Also, the version I replied to had no description, so I thought it meant “authors who have influenced your writing” rather than just influencing you personally.

Bearing that in mind, here’s what I wrote:

15 People/Groups of People Who I’ve (Lovingly) Ripped Off Wholesale

Because I’m so poorly read, I’m not limiting this to proper authors. There’s just too much stuff to read for a film guy like me to keep up! ;) Besides, very few of the things I DO read are at all hip, and I write so little that few things end up legitimately influencing any writing at all, so…

– In no particular order after the first two, from whom I’ve definitely stolen the most –

That list would take me a while to think through and write down, but as for skeptic authors, I think Carl Sagan is the one that I enjoyed the most. Many things about Dawkins I don’t like, but it is more how he says things than what he says.

As I was composing this I thought of two questions. I was wondering if anyone else would name a poet and lo and behold @Expatria also listed Billy Collins. The other question was is there a difference between an author who influenced you and a specific book? There are lots of individual books I have nearly memorized that for the life of me I couldn’t tell you who wrote them. It was strictly the subject matter that grabbed me. These include:

The Code Book
Fractal Geometry of Nature (oh, crap, I should’ve known this was Mandelbrot)
Genetic Algorithms and Evolutionary Computation
How Things Work

It would be fun to see which imagined visual images come to mind for everyone when asked to recall a favorite piece of fiction. When I think of authors or a novel my reference is often a character or scene in a book that I’ve created in my mind. The memory is visual despite it being created in my mind while reading.

@Skulleigh: I have many fond memories of reading McCaffrey’s dragon/Pern books way back when.

I did this same meme on facebook except for albums. Since I’m a jazz musician and have lots of musician facebook friends, this was very nerve wracking. I find the author game to be a lot more comfortable, since I don’t put much of my self-worth into who I read. I definitely get where @Expatria is coming from, though.

Another note: I mention Gladwell, since I love his books, but something Rebecca said offhand on the SGU about his stuff being pseudosciencey has made me reevaluate some of his claims. (And nobody here mentioned him, too, which is another sign). Sometimes it’s easy to fall in love with an idea and shut off your brain to dissonance. I s’pose reevaluating even the things you love is what being a skeptic is all about, though.

I did this before reading any of the other lists (except Rebecca’s) so I’m going to make a guess that a couple of these are new to my list. Silverstein and White because they are childrens’ authors, Tan and Dickinson because they aren’t “serious”, and Bierce because everyone forgets about that bastard.
I’m going back to see if I’m right.

Can’t believe I left off Douglas Adams and Twain and Vonnegut! They were all on the short list I was trying to keep in my head. And when I thought about poets, Robert Frost was it. But the most inspired choice I completely forgot about was Dr Seuss.

These lists have reminded me of so many books I want to read again. And for the 1st time.

@Evelyn: I have read voraciously my whole life, so I could go on and onâ€¦ one thing I notice in the list above is the paucity of female writersâ€¦

Upon reflection I did manage to come up with one: Shirley Corriher. If the question had been “authors you like” rather than “authors who influenced you” I certainly would have thrown in Jane Austen and Emily Dickinson.

I wonder why women are underrepresented here? Does it speak more to our tastes or to the publishing industry or the sort of books women write? That last one is probably a bad guess. My wife reads lots of weighty, important tomes by women like Barbara Kingsolver. I just can’t make it through them.

The duplicates are very interesting! One that keeps coming up that I’m kicking myself for missing: Madeleine L’Engle. My absolute favorite when I was young and such a huge influence on my imagination and my writing.

Obviously, the exercise has to have some arbitrary limits, such as the first 15 you think of, not taking longer than 15 minutes. If you didn’t set limits then the lists would just keep going and going. Witness the posted addendums, including this one. One of my criteria is a book had to mean enough to me to revisit and reread it multiple times, or (in the case of Carl Zimmer’s Microcosm) be so fascinating that I know I will read it again. I hit 16 before I stopped to count, and couldn’t bear to remove any one of them, so I (not very cleverly) listed two number 8s. Most of mine were influential at different times in my life. I’m not a huge Edgar Rice Burroughs reader, but when I was 7, 8, 9, 10 I read Tarzan of the Apes until the book fell apart, taped it back together, and read it until it fell apart again. I haven’t read it in probably 30 years. I didn’t list Vonnegut because it didn’t immediately occur to me, but when I was 11 and my sister was in college, she sent me a copy of “Breakfast of Champions” and I went on a 5 or 6 year Vonnegut rampage.
With regards to female authors, I noticed years ago that there weren’t many on my list of “greats”. I don’t know why that is. There are many woman authors that I read for entertainment, but they didn’t make my off the cuff list of most influential. One exception that I thought of retrospectively is Marguerite Yourcenar. Her “Memoirs of Hadrian” is a fantastic book that I have revisited a few times. Two whose work I really enjoy are C.J. Cherryh and Nevada Barr.

@Rebecca Watson: Shameless name drop. One of Madelynâ€™s best friends is a good friend of ours and about ten years ago I had the opportunity to meet Madelyn, and even cook dinner for her. I was able to talk at length with her about what â€œA Wrinkle in Timeâ€ meant to me as a young reader and lotâ€™s more. I recall her saying that AWiT seems to have had a big impact on many young readers as my story was not unique.

@junco: When I was 10, 11, 12 I read every Tarzan and John Carter of Mars book by Burroughs. I donâ€™t have any real desire to reread those books, ( I am excited about the John Carter movie in production) but I do have great memories and those books led me to Herbert and Asimov so score one for Edgar!

@davew: I too was puzzled by the lack of female authors, even in my own list. It’s not that I don’t read them – I’ve read Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Grace Paley as well as multiple single titles by other female authors. Perhaps it’s that I’ve always been a tomboy, so “boyish” things appeal to me generally. I have multiple titles from a variety of male authors, but usually only single titles from female ones.

I am appalled that nobody has mentioned Sarah Vowell. Not just because of the lack of women authors listed, but she is a kickass writer who is so hip that it wouldn’t surprise me if she read this webpage!

I have always loved adventure writers. The top of my list would be John Krakauer, Sebastian Junger and Thor Heyerdahl. Most of Thor’s anthropological theories have been disproven, but he really put his neck out there! Nobody has put my imagination into Everest’s rarefied air like Krakauer. Junger found an ingenious way of telling a story whose details nobody was ever quite sure of.

As a professional outdoorsman, the writers who shaped my philosophy and choice of a career were Ted Trueblood, John Gierach, Ernest Hemingway, Pat McManus and Lee Wulff.

Humor writing has always been important to me. Dave Barry, Bill Bryson and Mark Twain loom large, as well as McManus and Vowell I already mentioned.

C.S. Lewis I will always regard fondly, because he introduced the concept of escapism. For an early adolescent boy trapped in a town and school he didn’t like, stepping through magic portals to sail on clipper ships was very appealing.

There are some writers whose work I have read gobs of, but don’t consider them important to me. Steven King writes more than i can read, and just didn’t stick to me. I bet I put Piers Anthony’s kids through college, but a year ago I tried re-reading one title that I so enjoyed sophomore year of high school. The novel seemed so ridiculous that I can’t believe I ever dug that rubbish.

I want to list F.S. Fitzgerald on my top 15, but does it count if he only wrote one book I like? I absolutely hated My Side of Paradise when I was made to read it in high school. But the Great Gatsby is the most finely crafted novel I have ever read – not a word is superfluous or misplaced.